Reflective practices and teaching go hand in hand. Teachers/ educators are very aware of their strengths and areas to improve. Kids tend to help us realize these areas in real time as we work through our day. The best strategy oftentimes is to address, adjust and move on. In that spirit, I have collected a few articles to read.

The following Carl Rogers quote is for my counseling and school psychologist colleagues.

Can I be strong enough as a person to be separate from the other? Can I be a sturdy respecter of my own feelings, my own needs, as well as his? Can I own and, if need be, express my own feelings as something belonging to me and separate from his feelings? Am I strong enough in my own separateness that I will not be downcast by his depression, frightened by his fear, nor engulfed by his dependency? Is my inner self hardy enough to realise that I am not destroyed by his anger, taken over by his need for dependence, nor enslaved by his love, but that I exist separate from him with feelings and rights of my own? When I can freely feel this strength of being a separate person, then I find that I can let myself go much more deeply in understanding and accepting him because I am not fearful of losing myself. (1961, p.52.)

Rogers, C. R. (1961), On Becoming a Person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Teaching

1. Authenticity in teaching
2. Teaching with authenticity 
3. Higher education article
4. Perception of authenticity

General boundaries

1. 8 preventers of authentic happiness
2. Book suggestion

A big player in psychology is Martin Seligman who wrote  Authentic Happiness (2002) which brought positive psychology into the mainstream.

In Authentic Happiness, Seligman describes a compellingly simple model of happiness based on three pathways:

Positive emotion – leading to a pleasant life

Flow – leading to an engaged life

Purpose – leading to a meaningful life

In short, the Authentic Happiness model suggested that you can achieve happiness in your life by pursuing one or more of these three pathways. This means that even if, for example, you don’t experience much positive emotion in your life, you can still be happy by doing activities which engage or absorb you fully, or by finding meaning in life by using your strengths in service of something larger. This conclusion was probably quite a relief to Seligman, who freely acknowledges in the book that until relatively recently he himself had been a bit of a grouch.